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Norman Oliver Birch
In the short story Simple Arithmetic, Norman Oliver Birch was a bank clerk who absconded with £20,000 worth of bank notes and travelers cheques. He had taken off from Stanton Flying Club, supposedly on a cross-country flight night-flying flight test and was never seen again. The numbers of the notes and travelers cheques were known. When they did not show up after a long period of time, and his aricraft had not been found, Gaskin and Biggles, who were investigating, assumed that Birch must have crashed in the sea. Almost three months later, Marcel Brissac called Biggles and asked if five two-gallon cans of aviation spirit meant anything to him. Apparently a French farmer had found five cans, mostly empty, abandoned in a ditch on his land. Experts determined that the cans were British in origin and had once contained aviation spirit. At first Biggles thought there was nothing significant in this but then he remembered that a jobbing gardener who worked for Birch had seen five two-gallon petrol cans in his garage and these cans had disappeared at the same time as Birch. Moreover, no passport belonging to Birch had been found in his house, suggesting that he might have been carrying it with the intention of flying abroad. Biggles surmised that Birch might have carried the cans of petrol with him on board his Auster J1 Autocrat in order to extend its range. He must have landed in the farmer's field to refuel his aircraft and then abandoned the cans. Biggles knew an Auster had a range of 440 miles and so drew a circle on a map with this radius centred on the Stanton Flying Club where Birch took off. Since an Auster had a consumption of five gallons an hour, the fuel in the cans would give him another 200 miles. Accordingly, Biggles drew a second circle with a radius 200 miles further. Biggles next assumed that Birch, flying in fine weather, would have flown a straight course. Thus he drew a line connecting Stanton with the place the cans were found and then extended it to the limit of the second circle. Birch must have come down somewhere along that line between the first and second circles. The end of the line led to a location in the Cevennes in France. This location was significant because, according to Gaskin's notes, Birch had grown up in France as a child and spoke French fluently. He used to take holidays in France at Florac, a town in the Cevennes. Biggles notified Marcel of these findings and a week later Marcel called to say that the French police had found the wreckage of an aircraft which had crashed in a deep chasm in the Cevennes. Biggles flew to the spot and was able to identify Birch's body and also recover a rucksack in which he had carried his stolen banknotes. As Biggles observed, most crooks make mistakes and Birch had made two. He had abandoned the cans, which put the police on to his trail. Second, he had overestimated his skill as a pilot. He must have attempted to land on one of the many plateuax in the Cevennes and had gone over the edge, plunging into the chasm to his death. Category:People Category:Air Police era characters Category:Biggles characters